


To Win The Holy Cross

by cerie



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Daddy Issues, F/M, Gen, warnings for domestic violence, will's horrible childhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-28 14:58:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2736824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerie/pseuds/cerie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the right thing is <i>being</i> there instead of dying on a hill in Avalon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Win The Holy Cross

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Callie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callie/gifts).



> Spoilers for The Newsroom 3x05 "Oh Shenandoah."

_2006_

“What the fuck are you even _talking_ about? There is no fucking way that I’m not doing this story and if it requires me to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan then I’m going to book a one way ticket. Don’t you dare tell me what I can and can’t do!” 

MacKenzie’s face is bright red and her voice pitches higher and higher as she rails at him, spouting off statistics and facts and a whole bunch of things that are meant to make him think it’s a good idea for her to go halfway across the world where he can’t protect her and risk her life like some greenhorn journalist and not an elitely-educated executive producer. She’s a wealthy woman. She doesn’t have to do this. Will thinks he’d buy out her contract and make her a stay at home wife before he’d let her go to Afghanistan to report on the Taliban.

“MacKenzie, I won’t let you go over there. Hire a goddamn stringer and we’ll put him on tv but I’m not letting you go. You’re not going.” MacKenzie makes an unintelligible sound and lunges toward him, her hands reaching up toward his shoulders and Will’s reaction is instinctual - he grabs her wrists and pushes her away, thumbs digging into her soft, pale skin. MacKenzie stumbles when he pushes her; Will has six inches and over a hundred pounds on her and it’s not a fair fight. It reminds him of so many fights he’s seen before, only instead of MacKenzie it’s his petite blonde mother stumbling backward, reeling from heavy hands against her head and body. He remembers the sound of her crying, a low keening sound under the boom of his father’s voice and he remembers how his father would be afterward, how he’d be sickly sweet and beg to come back. 

_Kathy, I’m sorry. Kathy, baby, let me back in. Kathy, you know I can’t help it when you push me into it. Do you want me to go to jail again? We’ve got kids, Kathy, I can’t take care of our kids when you get me locked up. You know that. You don’t want them to starve, do you?_

Over and over and over. Will is vaguely aware of MacKenzie’s quiet voice calling his name but he can’t deal with this right now. He damn near hurt her because he was angry, full of blinding rage, and for all his attempts to make something of himself instead of a stringy farm boy from Nebraska with hand-me-downs and not enough to eat, he’s just the same. He’s just like _him_. Maybe he lives in this Manhattan apartment with windows open to the sky and maybe he wears designer suits and makes his money without getting callouses on his hands but he’s exactly the same. He’s no better and no worse than his father and the worst part is that he can hear him in the back of his head, reminding him that he’s never going to amount to anything and to just stop trying. He can hear his voice, reedy and thin instead of the booming voice from his memory, reminding him that he’s just the same. 

_Feels good, doesn’t it? To hit me? To hit your father? Bet you won’t do it again._

Will walks away from MacKenzie and the fleeting glimpse he gets of her face reveals not fear but confusion. She looks stunned and, to be honest, Will can understand that. He’s stunned too. It’s the eerie feeling of being shell shocked, of walking quiet streets with mortar echoing in his ears. He stumbles into the bathroom and runs cold water, splashing it into his face. When he looks down at his hands, they’re shaking. 

His hands have done a lot of things. They’ve signed checks for property that costs more than his mother made in her entire lifetime. They’ve signed autographs for fans. They’ve signed legal documents, driven expensive cars, slid along the silken-skinned body of MacKenzie for hours and hours. They’ve done work, too. They’ve replaced a carburetor in a ‘57 Chevy that’s more rust than metal. They’ve rebuilt the motor in a tractor, milked a cow and helped deliver a calf. 

These hands have wrapped around a bottle of Dewar’s and cracked it across a grown man’s face. They’ve braided the hair of his little sisters when the fighting goes on well into the small hours of the night. They’ve run over the beads of a rosary until Hail Mary and Glory Be cease to have meaning any longer and just become a chant in the long vigil of the night. 

They’ve hurt MacKenzie. 

The bile rises in his throat, sour, and it burns until he purges it. He sinks down to the floor to christen the toilet too, dry heaving until the only thing he can do is press his face against the cool porcelain and just breathe. If he focuses on this and not what he did, maybe he can find his center again. Will has always had a temper, that’s true, but he’s never done this. He’s never crossed this line and it scares him shitless that he did that with MacKenzie, whom he loves more than life. How can she trust him? How can they fix this? 

It feels like an eternity when he feels like he can stand again and while he’s not quite steady, he thinks he can get from the bathroom to the bedroom. He’s half afraid that when he does get the balls to leave, MacKenzie’s going to be gone and he’s relieved to see her curled on her side in his bed, delicate cheekbones highlighted by the silvery moonlight streaming in from the window. Will carefully sits on the edge of the bed and skims his fingertips along the curve of her waist; maybe if he’s feather-soft, she won’t wake. She won’t wake and she won’t remember she’s angry at him and he was angry at her and she won’t remember that he tried to hurt her. 

“Will?” Her voice is husky and soft and her eyes are so big in the pale light. When MacKenzie looks at him, he sees all the things he wants to be. He wants to be a good husband to her, eventually, and he wants to be her paladin. He wants to be the champion of all that is good and noble and pure and he wonders if he can, if he can still play Galahad in this particular fable. He hopes so. God, he hopes so. 

“Did I hurt you? God, Mac, did I hurt you?” His voice is shaking and MacKenzie frowns for a moment before sitting up and shaking her head. “No, Billy. You didn’t hurt me. You thought you hurt me? No. I’d knock you into next week if you hurt me and I’d figure out how to take half your money while I was at it.” 

Will laughs, though it’s more out of relief than amusement at her words. He knows that MacKenzie couldn’t ever hurt him if he really wanted to hurt her and that scares the shit out of him. He could have hurt her without even trying, could have caused bruises to blossom over her beautiful skin and could have twisted her soft smile into a grimace of pain. He can’t do that. Not to MacKenzie. Not to anyone but especially not to MacKenzie, whom he loves more than life. 

She wraps her arms around him and the words start tumbling out. He tells her how his father used to beat them and terrify them. How he used to beat their mother for any perceived infraction, no matter how small, and how his beautiful, kind mother just had the light snuffed out of her bit by bit over the years. It’s a slow thing, losing yourself to despair, and no matter what Will did he couldn’t make it stop. He knows the official cause of death was cancer but he can’t help but think that Kathy McAvoy didn’t just give up. He explains how his father was fond of his drink, cheap scotch whenever he could get it, and how he knows he shouldn’t be drinking but he does it anyway. 

“I hurt you, MacKenzie. I grabbed you with the intention to hurt...I wanted you...I was angry and I wanted you to see my side of it and I didn’t care what I had to do to make that happen. That’s not okay. This is not okay.” 

MacKenzie takes one of his hands, thumb brushing against the pad of his palm. “You recognized that it wasn’t all right and you stopped. I can’t...my childhood was happy, you know? There were five of us and we were all absolutely adored by my parents. I can’t possibly even begin to understand what you went through, the hell that he put you through. You were frightened that I wasn’t going to listen and you reacted badly, sure, but you didn’t...I’m confident you would never hurt me. You’d never do that. You want to know why?” 

Will tips his face up to look at her and MacKenzie cups his cheek, thumb brushing against his cheekbone. 

“You knew it was wrong, Will. It never occurred to him that it might be wrong but you knew it was wrong. Stop atoning for a sin you didn’t commit. You knew it was wrong and you stopped.”

Will turns his face in against her palm and kisses her skin, grateful that he has _this_ woman and she inexplicably wants to be with _him_. 

“Don’t go to Afghanistan. Please don’t go.” 

MacKenzie tugs him into her arms and he buries his face in against her neck. He hasn’t cried since he was ten and he isn’t planning to now but it’s a very close thing; he’s still reeling from what he did and from nearly losing MacKenzie and she still hasn’t promised him she won’t go overseas and put herself in danger for some goddamned story and he doesn’t know what he’ll do without her. He’s a little broken and jumbled up but somehow he seems to just fit with all her broken and jumbled pieces and they’re better together (he thinks) than either would be separately. He needs her. He needs this. 

“I won’t go now. Shh, Will. I won’t go now.” 

_2013_

Fifty three days. He’s spent fifty three days in jail and while he’s fought the good fight, he feels a little hollow inside. He’d been married all of eleven minutes before he went into jail and any attempts to get him out have resulted in an exercise in futility for all parties involved. He isn’t giving up the name of his source because it’s the principle of the thing. How is he supposed to teach these kids how to do the news and do it right if he’s not willing to make a sacrifice himself? It’s all fine and well to have principles when you’re the lofty media elite and quite another to put your money where your mouth is. Will wants to win this fight. He wants to win the moral victory and do the right thing - sometimes the right thing and the easy thing are mutually exclusive. 

When Rebecca comes in and tells him that the source committed suicide and he’s free of his journalistic obligation to her, he still doesn’t budge. The DOJ doesn’t get to decide when he will and will not compromise the integrity of his source and since Lily can’t give her permission, Will won’t take it without asking. His attorney thinks he’s an idiot, predictably, but he thinks MacKenzie will have his back on this. MacKenzie will understand. 

When he goes back into his cell to start whiling away the hours until day fifty four, his father comes back. He’s poking at him, sharp jabs, and he starts in on the mission to civilize and Will can hear in his tone how much he just doesn’t buy the bullshit that Will is trying to sell. His father is the one person he’s never been able to please, no matter how hard he tries, and it seems that even in death he still can’t please him. He can’t do it. He feels his resolve crumbling away and while he’s still made of brick and steel, eventually it’s all going to go to dust and he’s going to be left with nothing at all. 

He rubs his hands over his face and dips his head down, trying to weather the assault of his father one last time and when a call comes in several hours later, he’s shocked to hear that he’s won. The DOJ is vacating the contempt charge and he can go home. He can go home without compromising his unyielding loyalty and he’s won. 

He dresses in the suit he married MacKenzie in, books and photographs in hand, and when he walks outside, he sees MacKenzie highlighted by the sickly glow of the street lights. His heart lifts and he almost runs to her, pulling her in close. His skin feels damp and her body is shaking and he murmurs to her, soothing her, telling her that it’s all over and that he’s home. He’s done his time for truth and justice and he’s home, for good, with her. 

“Charlie...Charlie had a heart attack a few hours ago. He died, Will.” 

Suddenly his victory, his self-inflicted purgatory - they don’t seem very much like a victory at all. Sometimes doing the right thing means missing out on all the things you desperately, desperately need. 

Sometimes the right thing is _being_ there instead of dying on a hill in Avalon.


End file.
